Night Owl Cards

  It's the summer traveling season. We're visiting or greeting visitors, yet the cards keep coming. It's sometimes difficult to focus. What do I write about -- this or this ?   But I've finally settled on a couple of player collections, a rare off-shoot of my main collecting goals. I think they're impressive in their own way.   I just added the Topps Now card for Clayton Kershaw's 3,000th strikeout. I just had to get the card and didn't pay all that much for it. These cards are almost nothing to look at, I don't like them any more than I did when Topps Now first became a thing. Just think if Topps created an interesting design for these, it might have all my money.   But that's just the lead-in card for this post. One of my player collecting projects is to get all of Kershaw's flagship gold cards. I wrote about finishing the run through 2022 a couple of years ago. And I finally decided to get back on that project. So recently, three more cards ha...

  It's been a frustrating year for collecting the kind of cards I like collecting. I've eased up on my vintage interests because there's no sense paying those prices. I'm hoping they'll settle back to normal in the coming months or maybe years (ack!), but for now those are not hard-charging needs. The same with Kellogg's cards from the '70s, which practically break my heart. It wasn't even 3 or 4 years ago when dealers were close to begging me to take them at card shows and now try finding one of the stars from those sets uncracked for under 20 bucks.   I experienced first-hand this sticker shock after an accident in my card room a few weeks ago.   I store my completed Kellogg's sets in stacks of top-loaders atop a shelf, out of the sunlight. There's probably a better place for them but I like that I don't have to move them because moving leads to ruin when 3-D cards are involved. I probably should get them in one of those card storage boxes ...